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At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs. People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where

At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs. People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where the offices we have are perfunctory at best. The rationale is the usual one: collaboration, watercooler chat, unspecific evidence / "research" about productivity (that we are told definitely exists, but is yet to be shared). I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO... C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate and geographically limiting their talent pool. Whilst making workers more tired and less productive. I still have no idea where it comes from. My best guess is that nobody at that level wants to break ranks with the "collective wisdom" of "investors", which creates a kind of groupthink. (An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas.)

mountainriver 1y ago
In office work is an artifact of the boomer generation and gen X. The world has changed its relationship to work and they can’t seem to come to terms with it.
- Nursie 1y ago
  Not sure Gen X are in love with office work, the X'ers I know (and I am one) loooove working from home. We're at the stage in life where we've settled, got spacious-enough houses where we can dedicate some office space, and working from home gives us space to do stuff like a little home improvement in our lunch breaks, or be home for deliveries and tradespeople. Big win for me not having to commute several hours a day. I'm lucky enough to work for a place where there isn't an office to commute to, and I know I've got it good! As usual though, I'm sure I'm not representative. I was sure it was my generation that was going to put an end to the pointless war on drugs and other such stupid bullshit, yet here we are at peak influence (ages 45-60 approx) and it turns out the people in power in my generation are no different to those who came before. The problem is the kind of people who climb the greasy poles of politics and business. tl;dr - it ain't generational. Arseholes in charge are always the arseholes in charge.
a99c43f2d565504 1y ago
Maybe some positions are or feel worthy only when performed in physically social context. Jobs dealing with human problems have this tendency more often than those dealing more with non-human problems.
grepfru_it 1y ago
Sounds like Dell. Michael Dell owns a lot of commercial real estate, especially around main campus hq. More employees in the office, better returns on his commercial real estate. That’s my opinion anyway
- userbinator 1y ago
  How does that make sense? "Now that my employees don't need to occupy the space all the time, rent out (possibly parts of) the office for even more $$$" would be how I'd think if I were in his shoes.
  - grepfru_it 1y ago
    What? Around Dell campus in Austin is a Home Depot, a hotel, a Chili’s, a strip mall with various shopping outlets and what not. You can walk there from the front door. The idea is that all the employees can walk there for lunch, they will buy things on the way home, it’s just extending economic foot traffic to the tenants of Michael Dell’s commercial properties. Now they won’t go out of business! More money for Mr Dell! This is my theory at least. The foot traffic has increased greatly since the RTO mandate
    - bluedevil2k 1y ago
      That’s absurd - the guy’s worth $130B, you think he cares about the not-even-pocket-change that would come from owning the land that a Twin Peaks is on? Dell’s RTO is purely a silent downsizing.
      - grepfru_it 1y ago
        What if I told you we were both right?
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    Board members run scams on stakeholders all the time. I know of a CEO who is CEO of multiple companies and tells employees of one company (big one with many stakeholders) to work on stuff from his other smaller companies. It's basically just a scam to the stakeholders.
nickff 1y ago
I find this idea that there is a 'CEO RTO mania' to be absurd; if WFH was just as good for the company, and more attractive to employees, we should see a boom in WFH-first companies, which does not seem to be happening. Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers', preventing people from multi-tasking while 'working', and in some cases increasing 'teamwork'. In any case, it makes sense to have either a WFH organization, or an in-person one, but the mixed cases appear to be a friction-filled mess.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  > if WFH was just as good for the company, and more attractive to employees, we should see a boom in WFH-first companies, which does not seem to be happening. In this economy, you can't even make a company, let alone profess their benefits. This is all intentional. If/when the economy recovers and funding is flowing around, I predict we will see this huge boom in WFH companies, especially with startups. Unfortunately, larger corps are seeing "WFH" as yet another attempt to offshore as much labor as possible. I can't guarantee after this ebb that top tech companies will be begging for talent the same way they were last decade.
  - nickff 1y ago
    If WFH is a good deal for both sides (in a particular industry), I would expect new entrants to use it as a competitive advantage against existing businesses (likely hiring away talented staff). I agree that web-tech business formation seems depressed, but WFH should eventually win the day if it is all that advocates say. I expect WFH will expect, while remaining relatively niche, much like worker co-operatives.
    - watwut 1y ago
      Small companies use it as competitive advantage against existing businesses. The market is fully captured and you do not win by having better productivity or by being able to attract better people. You win by attracting a lot of capital and by being able to eventually create quasi monopoly. You think hot AI companies are somehow productive? They are in massive looses. Or that all those corporations have super productive workforce? Anyone who worked there knows they dont. The econ 101 thought experiments are just that - thought experiments about ideal world. They have much less to do with how actual companies operate.
lukasschwab 1y ago
> An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas. I think of Jeffrey Pfeffer's "social contagion" arguments a lot — first with regards to layoffs[^1], but increasingly also to RTO policies and tracked AI use. It seems very unlikely execs (esp. in small organizations) are taking the time to read and seriously evaluate research about RTO or AI and productivity. (Frankly, it seems much less likely than them doing serious modeling about layoffs.) At some point, the "contagion" becomes a matter of "best practices" — not just a way to show investors what you're doing, but part of the normal behavior shareholders expect. Bleak if true! [^1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/12/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/12/explains-recent-te...
- Schnitz 1y ago
  Just how software engineers are in the hacker news thought bubble you have the VC and CEO thought bubble. It roughly goes like this: Someone has some productivity or whatever problem and RTOs. That costs money, they lose people, so they can’t later admit it was a wash or a net negative. So they go on Twitter or LinkedIn and trumpet how great their hardcore 996 RTO is going. Now others see this and fomo kicks in. They start their own RTO which they are then again highly incentivized to report as successful. Rinse and repeat.
- devnullbrain 1y ago
  >the normal behavior shareholders expect. And for each CEO, those shareholders are mostly the same people. It's easy to get sucked into thinking this is just the way the world works but really we've just enshrined a local and temporal phenomenon. Layoffs aren't a physical law. There are places and times where this would not happen. Let me put my investor hat on: hiring at the top and firing at the bottom is a predictable inefficiency and represents a CEO failing at their responsibilities. You don't get to be a CEO and claim ignorance of market cycles.
mikestew 1y ago
C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate Executives often own the real estate and lease it back to the company. From Steve Ballmer to the owner of the tiny 85 person company I last worked at, it’s not uncommon. So, yeah, there’s often some financial incentive there.
- Nursie 1y ago
  Wasn't that one of the (many) dodgy things about wework under the original founder? Something about him buying the buildings and then having wework lease them from him? How that guy didn't end up on the receiving end of a load of criminal charges...
- jayd16 1y ago
  Don't they lease it whether its mandatory or not?
- kamaal 1y ago
  >>there’s often some financial incentive there. I know managers that were let go because it appeared like their only job was being host to that one stand up meeting everyday, and nothing else. I guess they just want people to return to save their own jobs.
ponector 1y ago
>> where it comes from It's a power play. To show regular folks their place. Big corpo is a modern feodal state, where CEO is an emperor, c-suites are kings, managers are barons, IC are peasants and external contractors are slaves(but leased from other owner). It's not only RTO, it's also about timetable and dress code. Yes, I had a beef with IT manager about dress code in the development office of a bank. Just because he can show his power he tried to enforce dress code.
- dan-robertson 1y ago
  A big difference between feudalism and modern societies is that in feudalism, you expect to earn much less than the value of the land you inherit and pass on (or the custom or right of your family farming the land) whereas in modern societies most people will earn much more in lifetime earnings than they would inherit or pass on. This results in far more social mobility and much more freedom in praxis. I don’t think companies are like feudal societies.
  - bwestergard 1y ago
    There was no market in land, so land could not have a monetary value in feudalism proper.
    - dan-robertson 1y ago
      Not having access to land you had a right to farm (and therefore needing to be a tenant farmer of some kind or – even worse – a wage labourer) was pretty bad for a peasant. It was also hard/impossible to escape from on the back of one’s labour. It is in this sense that land (or associated rights) was worth significantly more than one could make through labour.
  - closeparen 1y ago
    A West Coast software engineering career is barely worth the land underneath a house from which you could reasonably commute to it. We're getting there.
jimbob45 1y ago
Well every company just happens to be undertaking RTO at the same time so it seems to be above the exec level. I’ve seen hypotheses on here that city councils are putting on pressure to boost their local economies and another that boards of directors are pushing this as the last chance to layoff->outsource before H-1Bs are banned. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t appear to stem from innovative or independent executive thought.
- jameshart 1y ago
  What leverage does a city council hold over a remote business?
  - bluGill 1y ago
    They personally know the high exetutives in their area (not always c level). Probably the executive is knocking on doors for their political campaign. Between asking what the company wants they point out things the city wants.
  - shuffleexcit 1y ago
    [dead]
- stogot 1y ago
  Conspiracy theory: A RTO planning meeting at Davos of CEOs is likely the root cause
  - devnullbrain 1y ago
    They've done it with pay and they've done it with hiring.
- vb6sp6 1y ago
  [dead]
vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
At the same time they are offshoring to countries on the other side of the globe so working hours never overlap.
Quarrelsome 1y ago
> I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO same reason some people think "professionalism" is about wearing smart shoes. While these sorts will never admit it to themselves, you are there to make them feel important. What you actually do is secondary, which is why they pay more attention to bullshit like presenteeism, than they do your work. Man, if I could get the same level of attention on my PRs over the course of my career as I do about being occasionally late, then that'd be great.
MangoToupe 1y ago
My theory is it's just about exerting arbitrary control over employees. I personally can buy that there are limited productivity benefits to working in person together, but a) we don't see the benefit of that productivity, and b) it comes at enormous personal cost to employees.
al_borland 1y ago
Several years before the pandemic I was forced to move several states away after my local office was shutdown and the company was looking to force everyone to a few larger offices. It didn’t make any sense. Within my little 10 person team, we had people in 5 states and at least 2 counties, spanning multiple time zones. I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I saw very little point to being in the office. If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office. The whole thing was madness. I do see the value in meeting people face-to-face, but I also think they could be done with the occasional company event. I have to imagine having a few events where people can meeting and build some rapport is cheaper than maintaining offices year round.
- ghostpepper 1y ago
  > If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office. As far as I can tell this is what apple does, and it actually makes a lot more sense than "you must be in some office but we don't care where".
  - losteric 1y ago
    I’m sure geographic consolidation is the end state, we’re just taking incremental steps.
    - goalieca 1y ago
      Many companies with > 1500 employees were not consolidated in the decade before. Especially those which had grown through acquisition.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  > I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I am curious: What was your job? Sales? Support?
  - 1y ago
hibikir 1y ago
I know of a certain large company I will not name that is sending people back to office while also having a huge percentage of staff augmentation consultants living outside of the US. So you can find teams that have two people in the office, working side by side with another 10 people in the team that are remote, and interacting with teams that might be a 7, 8 timezones away. You can imagine how well those people feel about RTO, and how it helps their collaboration.
- ivape 1y ago
  They are going lose everyone soon as hiring picks up. Short sighted.
  - Charon77 1y ago
    Not short sighted if _that_ is the goal. Maybe it's just to cut off people they have overhired during the pandemic. Maybe they just need fresh faces without costly layoffs
    - themafia 1y ago
      I have a hard time believing this a 5th year correction of a past hiring bubble.
  - Teever 1y ago
    Are they though? Do you see any legitimate opposition to the big tech companies forming from recently laid off employees? If there's no alternative for people to work for then if the job market improves people are just going to go back to the same companies. So, are these people who feel spurned by the big tech companies getting together and starting competitors to bring them down?
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      Lol you can't outcompete microsoft or google.
- 1y ago
dmitrygr 1y ago
Come join GM (formerly Cruise) ADAS org. We are hiring. Work is pretty cool at every level from kernel and drivers to userspace linux to frameworks, to ML. And, as long as you are >50 mi from detroit, you are going to be fully remote. Pay is good. People are good. Jobs are posted on GM's jobs site, or reach out to me, if you'd like, and i'll connect you to the right people.
- titanomachy 1y ago
  Looks cool. You work on this as an IC? And you genuinely like your job? What part of the stack are you in? Fellow ex-Googler, looking for an interesting systems programming role.
  - dmitrygr 1y ago
    Kernel and drivers currently, hoping to move lower level to MCUs soon (i like that world more). My contact info is in my profile here, feel free to email. GM does not (as far as i know) have referral bonuses so i have no reason to oversell it :)
- rootusrootus 1y ago
  I read things like this and wish that when I was doing my masters at OMSCS I had focused more on ML. What I wouldn't give to work in a shop that was actually building something cool.
  - dmitrygr 1y ago
    There is plenty of non-ML work to do. Drivers do not write themselves, bringup does not do itself, scripts that glue it all together do not write themselves, schematics do not review themselves :)
mirrorsaurus 1y ago
It's a control measure for hypocritical companies who can't get their tech shit in order. They will fail though.
itake 1y ago
This could be chicken or the egg, but I had a team member (that missed office time) for about 3 weeks, at the same time, they dramatically reduced the number of MRs merged and responsiveness on Slack. I don’t know if her being in the office would have dampened their lack of engagement or if the office was making it worse.
reenorap 1y ago
> I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO It's because although many people do work well in RTO, the vast majority don't. And the various TikTok videos showing "Day in the life of a remote worker" didn't help the cause either. I worked at a fully remote company during the pandemic and trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them and it was one of the most frustrating experiences in my career. I love working in the office, mainly for the social aspect and free food, but I need to find remote work for personal reasons. And I'm about 2 years too late because almost no one in Big Tech is allowing remote work anymore.
- j-bos 1y ago
  > trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them I don't understand why this is such a problem. I've even heard CEOs complain about this, about their direct reports. Child, if someone is AWOL on their job and they're blocking you, ring their boss. And if you're the boss, hold them to account. Why do so many orgs need a steamroller to level the flower beds.
  - Longlius 1y ago
    That's because this isn't actually a thing that's happened. I've seen plenty of remote employees fired for not being available during business hours. The idea that we need mass RTO to handle a few problem employees is silly.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  > They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them and it was one of the most frustrating experiences in my career. If you’re being blocked by someone online, you’d be blocked offline too.
  - simoncion 1y ago
    And if a coworker is refusing to speak with you on the system that the company provides you to speak with them, why haven't you complained to your manager (or your manager's manager) about the clear and obvious blocker to getting your work done? One of the following is true: OP is the biggest doormat in the world, the company OP works for is incredibly dysfunctional and cannot be saved, or OP's story could be found in the "Things That Never Happened" Jeopardy category.
truncate 1y ago
>>> executives' obsession with RTO I think part of it is that you don't get to feel the power on Zoom meetings. People coming to your office, or lining up for you in conference room ... that's would feel nice and give you sense of importance. That said, if I was a manager and spend all day on meetings, I'd probably like to be in office as well and see people in person (not necessarily because of feeling important but just that I don't really like online meeting in general). As an IC, I goto office and then do all my meetings online anyway, so feels kind of pointless.
philwelch 1y ago
I don’t know how common this is generally, but I know at least one bigtech corporate campus that is surrounded by local businesses that, by and large, happen to be owned by the individuals in senior management at that company. So in that case it’s a classic vested interest.
keeda 1y ago
In addition to the other comments (yes, very much a powerplay) it is also likely that employers simply realized remote work is a huge perk they had not accounted for, and RTO is simply a means of renegotiating: https://www.tiktok.com/@keds_economist/video/7464731884195581230 https://www.tiktok.com/@keds_economist/video/746473188419558... The video presents a compelling theory that post-Covid employers realized that employees CAN be productive remotely, but also put a pretty high premium on being able to do so -- studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk. So the current coordinated RTO push is basically a renegotiation of salaries to account for that perk, especially now that it is very much an employer's market... which, BTW, is also the outcome of another very coordinated effort across the industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192092 Edit, some recent studies: - https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remote-works-value-would-you-take-pay-cut https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remot... - https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lower-pay-to-ditch-the-office/ https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lowe...
- tayo42 1y ago
  >studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk. That doesn't seem surprising for software. If I can make 300k remote or 400k in the office, that 100k tbh has dimishing returns on my life satisfaction. And 300k total comp is a ton off money in the first place.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  I like that theory, but where's the actual negotiations? This is a "get back to the office or you're fired".
  - keeda 1y ago
    Good point. I think a couple things are possible here: 1. They can't outright tell employees "we just realized you were getting a better deal than we bargained for, so now we are re-negotiating." Kind of like they couldn't tell us "you had too much of a good run during Covid and ZIRP, so now sit down," and instead did the layoffs. So they have to couch it in other terms like collaboration and watercoolers. I suspect most RTO policies will have some flexible language to the effect of "existing remote employees can figure it out with their managers," and part of that would be a renegotiation. This is not without precedence: a similar thing that happened during the height of post-Covid remote work was that employees moved to very low-cost locations, so most BigTech (and other) companies then instituted pay bands that depended on your location. To be fair, they were still very generous salaries for the locations in question, but the reasoning they used was "our pay is competitive relative to the market, and your market just changed." Those must have been some fun conversations for managers but they happened and most employees accepted. BTW a common argument then was "how does my location matter as long as my output provides the same value." Employers interpreted that as "Hmm, location doesn't really matter, so why not pay somebody across the world who can provide the same value at a fraction of the cost." 2. They are not interested in direct renegotiations and the RTO wave is still part of a "silent" layoff, which also has the side-effect of depressing salaries. Those who remain will be less likely to ask for raises, or be more willing to renegotiate to get back their remote perks. Those looking for new jobs will naturally enter a negotiation phase if they get an offer. There may be other mechanisms at play too.
mji 1y ago
I think CEO types simply believe (rightly or wrongly) that a large number of people are taking advantage of WFH to barely work.
- symaxian 1y ago
  I'd like to ask these CEOs, for people which are taking advantage of the system, why are they not let go? Could it be that management often have no clue how much value each employee brings to the team? Is RTO being mandated to avoid facing that uncomfortable truth?
  - jayd16 1y ago
    If they admit its true but the solution still stands, would you feel any better?
  - mji 1y ago
    Because their hiring process will just hire more employees who will take advantage of the system
Madhouse61 1y ago
Collaboration, Water cooler chats it's all bullshit. Cut through the fat and you find C-Suites need to justify the millions being spent on Real estate.
Drunkfoowl 1y ago
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cml123 1y ago
My employer is currently mandating a 2 day per-week RTO for all employees within 50 miles of a major office, but in my case, even if they wanted to, they'd be unable to force a return to a 5 day arrangement. My commute time has more than doubled since they closed and sold my office for a hefty sum of money. As a result of multiple offices converging to one, there are insufficient seats for the number of employees actually assigned to my office; hence, "hotdesking". I'd wager that maybe a third of the total employees assigned to the office could be present at any one point in time, so unless they purchase some additional properties, we're at a stalemate with the twice a week RTO. Most days over 90% of the desks, sometimes over 99% are taken in the building, requiring reservation weeks in advance through a seat reservation app. I have no direct teammates in the office and no two members of my 10 person team work in the same office (or state).
- thegreatpeter 1y ago
  Where do you work?
  - cml123 1y ago
    A large insurer with an inexplicable bird mascot
glimshe 1y ago
I hate when people mention "watercooler chats" - not you, of course, but the clueless leadership/HR people that come up with this. Last time I heard it, it was: "the best ideas sometimes come from a watercooler chat, so we need to have people in the office". I've worked in offices for decades. While every now and then I'd see watercooler chats that were related to work instead of sports/bitching/weather, they never remotely compared to "ad-hoc whiteboarding chats" or "team area chats". Most Engineers I know, myself included, need focus and a space for impromptu conversations with a group of Engineers, preferably away from PMs and salespeople. If the people advocating "watercooler chats" really wanted to make Engineers productive, they would kill open floor offices and give Engineers privacy for long spontaneous technical conversations with other Engineers.
- shigawire 1y ago
  My employer has never allowed remote work and likely never will. They have private offices for all developers and insist on the unmeasurable value of in person work. I don't love it, but I at least respect they are upfront about it and are consistent vs flip flopping and impacting people's lives unexpectedly.
Spooky23 1y ago
Fraud. There’s a shit-ton of people working multiple jobs and outsourcing themselves. Everything is SaaS now, so that creates a liability for many larger companies with .gov or healthcare contracts.
wombatpm 1y ago
Are they requiring VP approval for zoom meetings? Requiring zoom meetings to be restricted to office network IP addresses? I’m the kind of employee that would comply, not answer my cell phone and require people to leave voicemails on my desk line, call out people who are multitasking, and actively call out managers who attend meetings via zoom. RTO with back to back zoom meetings all day is a waste of everyone’s time and energy. Make management show us the benefit of all this RTO collaboration. Oh, and I’m done checking email and teams after hours. Not safe to do so while driving.
dragonwriter 1y ago
RTO mandates are about many things, but actual business value of being in the office to the business doing the mandate is low on the list. Among the things it is about: (1) Executives with emotional attachment to certain leadership styles that are enabled by physical presence, (2) Interest in the investor class for the commercial real estate market. The business impacted may not be invested in it, but the businesses’ shareholders in sufficient numbers probably are, and so are the influential constituents of the politicians they want favors from, in a time of increasingly naked political corruption and cronyism. (3) Backdoor layoffs. RTO is unpopular with large swathes of the work force, and people will quit because of it. That’s good for a firm likely to be cutting positions anyway; there’s no need for severance, regardles of scale there’s no WARN Act notice requirement, and if you still have to cut more positions afterwards, it makes it less likely that those cuts will hit WARN Act thresholds. And while the people that quit may not be the ones it would be your first choice to cut, they are the ones that would be most likely to quit in the kind of less-employee-friendly and financially leaner (in real terms) times likely to exist for a while after cuts.
- whateveracct 1y ago
  This is dead on. In software especially, we have established ways for distributed individuals to collaborate (FOSS). RTO is meant to coddle the waterfall-addicted executive class.
  - yepitwas 1y ago
    It's pretty funny to watch e.g. some little FOSS console game system emulator—an actual toy, or at least, a project in service of a toy and of game-playing, to a large extent, but also technically more challenging than a lot of corporate work—or maybe some FOSS MMO server re-implementation coordinate development across continents with nothing but IRC, email, and Github (if that, LOL) and do it efficiently with little friction and volunteers working in their spare time and zero people with a dedicated "project manager" title, while companies pretend they need this whole fucking edifice of communication systems and people sitting in cubicles in particular places just to shuffle a few gigabytes of spreadsheet data around with Python or whatever. Yeah. No you don't. You're, somehow, a fraction as competent and professional as some teens and 20-somethings making toys in their spare time, if you do. Definitely deserve seven-plus figure salaries for that.
LtWorf 1y ago
It's just a way to do layoffs…
whstl 1y ago
A previous company I worked at has a satellite office with one single employee, and mandates office 3 days a week. The excuse is that “people in bigger offices will feel bad if we open an exception”, so they’re spending a few thousand a month on real estate to make some poor sod miserable.
- devnullbrain 1y ago
  The efficiency of private markets in action.
aprilthird2021 1y ago
> I still have no idea where it comes from. I work at a company that tracks productivity in many ways and even the screentime of each employee. I'm quite sure remote employees or even hybrid employees on their WFH days, spend less time on the screen or doing things productivity trackers track compared to in office colleagues.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Productivity tracker that tracks sport/fashion/travel chats for hours, dozens of smoke breaks and employees shitting every 16 minutes – very advanced tech.
  - simoncion 1y ago
    Productivity tracker that tracks the fiftieth complete train-of-thought derailment from the fiftieth loud-ass boisterous conversation initiated by the sales guys across the room from me in the exposed-concrete-from-floor-to-ceiling open-plan office. Very advanced tech Corporate has paid for!
    - wiseowise 1y ago
      Remember! > we need the kind of energy and momentum that comes from smart people working side by side, solving challenging problems together
      - simoncion 1y ago
        I kept myself "in the groove" during those times by reminding myself that Moloch is sustained by this kind of energy. If not for Moloch, then for whom? He undergirds our world!
znpy 1y ago
> I still have no idea where it comes from. i was chatting with HR boss last week. he's 100% sure these kind of mandates are reductions in force (layoffs) masked as return to office.
whatevaa 1y ago
So much increased productivity when you come to the office and still make all your meetings over a call.
throwaw12 1y ago
Things which might be contributing to the RTO in my opinion: 1. Showing up. Practically speaking, when you're at home, you can do whatever you want (sleep, watch TV, work sometimes), while delivering stellar result for the company, but when you're in the office there is a chance you will deliver your stellar results and additionally contribute more, because you literally can't watch TV and take a nap. 2. Some leaders thrive in the presence of others. This is how they get their energy, receiving compliments about how awesome they are, noticing how people are respecting them while they walk around the office and so on. If one of them asks their team to return to the office, similar leaders might envy them when they boast about how much cooler their meetings feel now with five people in the room and sharing their meetings on the LinkedIn. 3. Work style of leadership. If you have noticed VP+ and C levels usually try to get to know each other on a personal level, they attend each others personal events. They work in this way, and they expect to see those same people in the office, because for them, their current network for work and life is same. So they like to see their 'friends' in the office as much as possible. Then naturally, these leaders translate mandate to their reports without context (e.g. their reports don't attend their personal life events, and they are not in their friend network)
- simoncion 1y ago
  > ...when you're in the office there is a chance you will deliver your stellar results and additionally contribute more, because you literally can't watch TV and take a nap. I see you've never seen many Silicon Valley software companies. Couches and comfortable chairs are a not-infrequent sight in the trendy open-plan offices, as are folks sleeping, reading, or otherwise slacking off atop them.
  - throwaw12 1y ago
    it's not about missing amenities, it's about pressure from your peers and additional eyes in the office to make you work. At home you can literally spend whole day in front of TV and work a little, in the office you can as well watch TV, but not consistently, every day for full day.
    - 1y ago
whywhywhywhy 1y ago
> I still have no idea where it comes from A not so small group of people being over-employed or never available or just not pulling their weight tainted the whole thing. Also honestly once a % of us were back in the office having to talk to remote people over a video call and waiting for the lag and having them speak over you because of the lag or get confused because they can't hear the chat we can all hear in the room builds animosity towards them. Can probably list 2 people I'm happy to work with remote but the number I worked with who took the piss with it is in the double digits.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
In our case we're still hybrid, but unlike before when everyone was in the office, your lunch hour all of a sudden counts against you. They want you in the building a full 8 hours, and despite otherwise being remote, you cannot make up any hours. I miss when before COVID firms were fine with flexing hours, now it seems they want to be draconian. I was drastically more productive as a remote software engineer. I have severe insomnia and for some ungodly reason the later hours are my most productive. You wont get that productivity from me if I'm in an office a full 8 hours, I'm NOT working overtime.
xyst 1y ago
It’s simple. It comes from the boards of these companies who have investments in corporate real estate. Got to keep the scam going at the expense of worker mental state, environment, and of course control.
xylophile 1y ago
The executive class is entirely based on personal branding. If you're not changing anything, it's like being a TikTok influencer without posting any new videos. It doesn't matter what you post really, and often the more controversial you are the better. If you play your cards right, you're not an "idiot" for making the company worse, you're a "bold and innovative thought leader". You often see the same thing from ambitious managers. Aka, "managers gonna manage". The other part of the equation is pure politics and PR, which at least does provide some real value to the company (if only temporarily, and at long-term net negative). Amazon made it pretty clear that their RTO was all about maintaining their relationship with politicians.
dogleash 1y ago
> collaboration, watercooler chat I've been wondering what this really means. So I've been actively observing our open office recently. As far as I can sus out, it's the phenomenon where enough people are subject to conversations they weren't invited to, that someone will always step in and steer obviously wrong/uninformed conversations. As an operating theory, it also explains why management wants us to make more use of the large slack channels. I've previously made the joke that slack is just the din of an open office for remote workers, and, well, I guess that is the literal deliberate intent.
joeross 1y ago
“collective wisdom” is basically a polite euphemism for groupthink and given that c level folks are all taking the same mba/sigma/cthulu worship courses it’s not surprising.
krageon 1y ago
It's because C-level people are extraverted and believe in torturing others to please themselves. As a concept it fits perfectly with the reasoning that you should earn ten times what another employee at your company does.

mountainriver 1y ago

In office work is an artifact of the boomer generation and gen X. The world has changed its relationship to work and they can’t seem to come to terms with it.

Nursie 1y ago
Not sure Gen X are in love with office work, the X'ers I know (and I am one) loooove working from home. We're at the stage in life where we've settled, got spacious-enough houses where we can dedicate some office space, and working from home gives us space to do stuff like a little home improvement in our lunch breaks, or be home for deliveries and tradespeople. Big win for me not having to commute several hours a day. I'm lucky enough to work for a place where there isn't an office to commute to, and I know I've got it good! As usual though, I'm sure I'm not representative. I was sure it was my generation that was going to put an end to the pointless war on drugs and other such stupid bullshit, yet here we are at peak influence (ages 45-60 approx) and it turns out the people in power in my generation are no different to those who came before. The problem is the kind of people who climb the greasy poles of politics and business. tl;dr - it ain't generational. Arseholes in charge are always the arseholes in charge.

a99c43f2d565504 1y ago

Maybe some positions are or feel worthy only when performed in physically social context. Jobs dealing with human problems have this tendency more often than those dealing more with non-human problems.

grepfru_it 1y ago

Sounds like Dell. Michael Dell owns a lot of commercial real estate, especially around main campus hq. More employees in the office, better returns on his commercial real estate. That’s my opinion anyway

userbinator 1y ago
How does that make sense? "Now that my employees don't need to occupy the space all the time, rent out (possibly parts of) the office for even more $$$" would be how I'd think if I were in his shoes.
- grepfru_it 1y ago
  What? Around Dell campus in Austin is a Home Depot, a hotel, a Chili’s, a strip mall with various shopping outlets and what not. You can walk there from the front door. The idea is that all the employees can walk there for lunch, they will buy things on the way home, it’s just extending economic foot traffic to the tenants of Michael Dell’s commercial properties. Now they won’t go out of business! More money for Mr Dell! This is my theory at least. The foot traffic has increased greatly since the RTO mandate
  - bluedevil2k 1y ago
    That’s absurd - the guy’s worth $130B, you think he cares about the not-even-pocket-change that would come from owning the land that a Twin Peaks is on? Dell’s RTO is purely a silent downsizing.
    - grepfru_it 1y ago
      What if I told you we were both right?
- LtWorf 1y ago
  Board members run scams on stakeholders all the time. I know of a CEO who is CEO of multiple companies and tells employees of one company (big one with many stakeholders) to work on stuff from his other smaller companies. It's basically just a scam to the stakeholders.

nickff 1y ago

I find this idea that there is a 'CEO RTO mania' to be absurd; if WFH was just as good for the company, and more attractive to employees, we should see a boom in WFH-first companies, which does not seem to be happening. Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers', preventing people from multi-tasking while 'working', and in some cases increasing 'teamwork'. In any case, it makes sense to have either a WFH organization, or an in-person one, but the mixed cases appear to be a friction-filled mess.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
> if WFH was just as good for the company, and more attractive to employees, we should see a boom in WFH-first companies, which does not seem to be happening. In this economy, you can't even make a company, let alone profess their benefits. This is all intentional. If/when the economy recovers and funding is flowing around, I predict we will see this huge boom in WFH companies, especially with startups. Unfortunately, larger corps are seeing "WFH" as yet another attempt to offshore as much labor as possible. I can't guarantee after this ebb that top tech companies will be begging for talent the same way they were last decade.
- nickff 1y ago
  If WFH is a good deal for both sides (in a particular industry), I would expect new entrants to use it as a competitive advantage against existing businesses (likely hiring away talented staff). I agree that web-tech business formation seems depressed, but WFH should eventually win the day if it is all that advocates say. I expect WFH will expect, while remaining relatively niche, much like worker co-operatives.
  - watwut 1y ago
    Small companies use it as competitive advantage against existing businesses. The market is fully captured and you do not win by having better productivity or by being able to attract better people. You win by attracting a lot of capital and by being able to eventually create quasi monopoly. You think hot AI companies are somehow productive? They are in massive looses. Or that all those corporations have super productive workforce? Anyone who worked there knows they dont. The econ 101 thought experiments are just that - thought experiments about ideal world. They have much less to do with how actual companies operate.

lukasschwab 1y ago

> An RTO mandate is also an excellent thing for a CEO to show investors they are doing, if they are not making money and lack better ideas. I think of Jeffrey Pfeffer's "social contagion" arguments a lot — first with regards to layoffs[^1], but increasingly also to RTO policies and tracked AI use. It seems very unlikely execs (esp. in small organizations) are taking the time to read and seriously evaluate research about RTO or AI and productivity. (Frankly, it seems much less likely than them doing serious modeling about layoffs.) At some point, the "contagion" becomes a matter of "best practices" — not just a way to show investors what you're doing, but part of the normal behavior shareholders expect. Bleak if true! [^1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/12/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/12/explains-recent-te...

Schnitz 1y ago
Just how software engineers are in the hacker news thought bubble you have the VC and CEO thought bubble. It roughly goes like this: Someone has some productivity or whatever problem and RTOs. That costs money, they lose people, so they can’t later admit it was a wash or a net negative. So they go on Twitter or LinkedIn and trumpet how great their hardcore 996 RTO is going. Now others see this and fomo kicks in. They start their own RTO which they are then again highly incentivized to report as successful. Rinse and repeat.
devnullbrain 1y ago
>the normal behavior shareholders expect. And for each CEO, those shareholders are mostly the same people. It's easy to get sucked into thinking this is just the way the world works but really we've just enshrined a local and temporal phenomenon. Layoffs aren't a physical law. There are places and times where this would not happen. Let me put my investor hat on: hiring at the top and firing at the bottom is a predictable inefficiency and represents a CEO failing at their responsibilities. You don't get to be a CEO and claim ignorance of market cycles.

mikestew 1y ago

C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate Executives often own the real estate and lease it back to the company. From Steve Ballmer to the owner of the tiny 85 person company I last worked at, it’s not uncommon. So, yeah, there’s often some financial incentive there.

Nursie 1y ago
Wasn't that one of the (many) dodgy things about wework under the original founder? Something about him buying the buildings and then having wework lease them from him? How that guy didn't end up on the receiving end of a load of criminal charges...
jayd16 1y ago
Don't they lease it whether its mandatory or not?
kamaal 1y ago
>>there’s often some financial incentive there. I know managers that were let go because it appeared like their only job was being host to that one stand up meeting everyday, and nothing else. I guess they just want people to return to save their own jobs.

ponector 1y ago

>> where it comes from It's a power play. To show regular folks their place. Big corpo is a modern feodal state, where CEO is an emperor, c-suites are kings, managers are barons, IC are peasants and external contractors are slaves(but leased from other owner). It's not only RTO, it's also about timetable and dress code. Yes, I had a beef with IT manager about dress code in the development office of a bank. Just because he can show his power he tried to enforce dress code.

dan-robertson 1y ago
A big difference between feudalism and modern societies is that in feudalism, you expect to earn much less than the value of the land you inherit and pass on (or the custom or right of your family farming the land) whereas in modern societies most people will earn much more in lifetime earnings than they would inherit or pass on. This results in far more social mobility and much more freedom in praxis. I don’t think companies are like feudal societies.
- bwestergard 1y ago
  There was no market in land, so land could not have a monetary value in feudalism proper.
  - dan-robertson 1y ago
    Not having access to land you had a right to farm (and therefore needing to be a tenant farmer of some kind or – even worse – a wage labourer) was pretty bad for a peasant. It was also hard/impossible to escape from on the back of one’s labour. It is in this sense that land (or associated rights) was worth significantly more than one could make through labour.
- closeparen 1y ago
  A West Coast software engineering career is barely worth the land underneath a house from which you could reasonably commute to it. We're getting there.

jimbob45 1y ago

Well every company just happens to be undertaking RTO at the same time so it seems to be above the exec level. I’ve seen hypotheses on here that city councils are putting on pressure to boost their local economies and another that boards of directors are pushing this as the last chance to layoff->outsource before H-1Bs are banned. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t appear to stem from innovative or independent executive thought.

jameshart 1y ago
What leverage does a city council hold over a remote business?
- bluGill 1y ago
  They personally know the high exetutives in their area (not always c level). Probably the executive is knocking on doors for their political campaign. Between asking what the company wants they point out things the city wants.
- shuffleexcit 1y ago
  [dead]
stogot 1y ago
Conspiracy theory: A RTO planning meeting at Davos of CEOs is likely the root cause
- devnullbrain 1y ago
  They've done it with pay and they've done it with hiring.
vb6sp6 1y ago
[dead]

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago

At the same time they are offshoring to countries on the other side of the globe so working hours never overlap.

Quarrelsome 1y ago

> I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO same reason some people think "professionalism" is about wearing smart shoes. While these sorts will never admit it to themselves, you are there to make them feel important. What you actually do is secondary, which is why they pay more attention to bullshit like presenteeism, than they do your work. Man, if I could get the same level of attention on my PRs over the course of my career as I do about being occasionally late, then that'd be great.

MangoToupe 1y ago

My theory is it's just about exerting arbitrary control over employees. I personally can buy that there are limited productivity benefits to working in person together, but a) we don't see the benefit of that productivity, and b) it comes at enormous personal cost to employees.

al_borland 1y ago

Several years before the pandemic I was forced to move several states away after my local office was shutdown and the company was looking to force everyone to a few larger offices. It didn’t make any sense. Within my little 10 person team, we had people in 5 states and at least 2 counties, spanning multiple time zones. I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I saw very little point to being in the office. If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office. The whole thing was madness. I do see the value in meeting people face-to-face, but I also think they could be done with the occasional company event. I have to imagine having a few events where people can meeting and build some rapport is cheaper than maintaining offices year round.

ghostpepper 1y ago
> If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office. As far as I can tell this is what apple does, and it actually makes a lot more sense than "you must be in some office but we don't care where".
- losteric 1y ago
  I’m sure geographic consolidation is the end state, we’re just taking incremental steps.
  - goalieca 1y ago
    Many companies with > 1500 employees were not consolidated in the decade before. Especially those which had grown through acquisition.
throwaway2037 1y ago
> I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I am curious: What was your job? Sales? Support?
- 1y ago

hibikir 1y ago

I know of a certain large company I will not name that is sending people back to office while also having a huge percentage of staff augmentation consultants living outside of the US. So you can find teams that have two people in the office, working side by side with another 10 people in the team that are remote, and interacting with teams that might be a 7, 8 timezones away. You can imagine how well those people feel about RTO, and how it helps their collaboration.

ivape 1y ago
They are going lose everyone soon as hiring picks up. Short sighted.
- Charon77 1y ago
  Not short sighted if _that_ is the goal. Maybe it's just to cut off people they have overhired during the pandemic. Maybe they just need fresh faces without costly layoffs
  - themafia 1y ago
    I have a hard time believing this a 5th year correction of a past hiring bubble.
- Teever 1y ago
  Are they though? Do you see any legitimate opposition to the big tech companies forming from recently laid off employees? If there's no alternative for people to work for then if the job market improves people are just going to go back to the same companies. So, are these people who feel spurned by the big tech companies getting together and starting competitors to bring them down?
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    Lol you can't outcompete microsoft or google.
1y ago

dmitrygr 1y ago

Come join GM (formerly Cruise) ADAS org. We are hiring. Work is pretty cool at every level from kernel and drivers to userspace linux to frameworks, to ML. And, as long as you are >50 mi from detroit, you are going to be fully remote. Pay is good. People are good. Jobs are posted on GM's jobs site, or reach out to me, if you'd like, and i'll connect you to the right people.

titanomachy 1y ago
Looks cool. You work on this as an IC? And you genuinely like your job? What part of the stack are you in? Fellow ex-Googler, looking for an interesting systems programming role.
- dmitrygr 1y ago
  Kernel and drivers currently, hoping to move lower level to MCUs soon (i like that world more). My contact info is in my profile here, feel free to email. GM does not (as far as i know) have referral bonuses so i have no reason to oversell it :)
rootusrootus 1y ago
I read things like this and wish that when I was doing my masters at OMSCS I had focused more on ML. What I wouldn't give to work in a shop that was actually building something cool.
- dmitrygr 1y ago
  There is plenty of non-ML work to do. Drivers do not write themselves, bringup does not do itself, scripts that glue it all together do not write themselves, schematics do not review themselves :)

mirrorsaurus 1y ago

It's a control measure for hypocritical companies who can't get their tech shit in order. They will fail though.

itake 1y ago

This could be chicken or the egg, but I had a team member (that missed office time) for about 3 weeks, at the same time, they dramatically reduced the number of MRs merged and responsiveness on Slack. I don’t know if her being in the office would have dampened their lack of engagement or if the office was making it worse.

reenorap 1y ago

> I remain baffled by executives' obsession with RTO It's because although many people do work well in RTO, the vast majority don't. And the various TikTok videos showing "Day in the life of a remote worker" didn't help the cause either. I worked at a fully remote company during the pandemic and trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them and it was one of the most frustrating experiences in my career. I love working in the office, mainly for the social aspect and free food, but I need to find remote work for personal reasons. And I'm about 2 years too late because almost no one in Big Tech is allowing remote work anymore.

j-bos 1y ago
> trying to get people online was almost impossible. They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them I don't understand why this is such a problem. I've even heard CEOs complain about this, about their direct reports. Child, if someone is AWOL on their job and they're blocking you, ring their boss. And if you're the boss, hold them to account. Why do so many orgs need a steamroller to level the flower beds.
- Longlius 1y ago
  That's because this isn't actually a thing that's happened. I've seen plenty of remote employees fired for not being available during business hours. The idea that we need mass RTO to handle a few problem employees is silly.
wiseowise 1y ago
> They would disappear for hours and I would be blocked by them and it was one of the most frustrating experiences in my career. If you’re being blocked by someone online, you’d be blocked offline too.
- simoncion 1y ago
  And if a coworker is refusing to speak with you on the system that the company provides you to speak with them, why haven't you complained to your manager (or your manager's manager) about the clear and obvious blocker to getting your work done? One of the following is true: OP is the biggest doormat in the world, the company OP works for is incredibly dysfunctional and cannot be saved, or OP's story could be found in the "Things That Never Happened" Jeopardy category.

truncate 1y ago

>>> executives' obsession with RTO I think part of it is that you don't get to feel the power on Zoom meetings. People coming to your office, or lining up for you in conference room ... that's would feel nice and give you sense of importance. That said, if I was a manager and spend all day on meetings, I'd probably like to be in office as well and see people in person (not necessarily because of feeling important but just that I don't really like online meeting in general). As an IC, I goto office and then do all my meetings online anyway, so feels kind of pointless.

philwelch 1y ago

I don’t know how common this is generally, but I know at least one bigtech corporate campus that is surrounded by local businesses that, by and large, happen to be owned by the individuals in senior management at that company. So in that case it’s a classic vested interest.

keeda 1y ago

In addition to the other comments (yes, very much a powerplay) it is also likely that employers simply realized remote work is a huge perk they had not accounted for, and RTO is simply a means of renegotiating: https://www.tiktok.com/@keds_economist/video/7464731884195581230 https://www.tiktok.com/@keds_economist/video/746473188419558... The video presents a compelling theory that post-Covid employers realized that employees CAN be productive remotely, but also put a pretty high premium on being able to do so -- studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk. So the current coordinated RTO push is basically a renegotiation of salaries to account for that perk, especially now that it is very much an employer's market... which, BTW, is also the outcome of another very coordinated effort across the industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192092 Edit, some recent studies: - https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remote-works-value-would-you-take-pay-cut https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remot... - https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lower-pay-to-ditch-the-office/ https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lowe...

tayo42 1y ago
>studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk. That doesn't seem surprising for software. If I can make 300k remote or 400k in the office, that 100k tbh has dimishing returns on my life satisfaction. And 300k total comp is a ton off money in the first place.
pavel_lishin 1y ago
I like that theory, but where's the actual negotiations? This is a "get back to the office or you're fired".
- keeda 1y ago
  Good point. I think a couple things are possible here: 1. They can't outright tell employees "we just realized you were getting a better deal than we bargained for, so now we are re-negotiating." Kind of like they couldn't tell us "you had too much of a good run during Covid and ZIRP, so now sit down," and instead did the layoffs. So they have to couch it in other terms like collaboration and watercoolers. I suspect most RTO policies will have some flexible language to the effect of "existing remote employees can figure it out with their managers," and part of that would be a renegotiation. This is not without precedence: a similar thing that happened during the height of post-Covid remote work was that employees moved to very low-cost locations, so most BigTech (and other) companies then instituted pay bands that depended on your location. To be fair, they were still very generous salaries for the locations in question, but the reasoning they used was "our pay is competitive relative to the market, and your market just changed." Those must have been some fun conversations for managers but they happened and most employees accepted. BTW a common argument then was "how does my location matter as long as my output provides the same value." Employers interpreted that as "Hmm, location doesn't really matter, so why not pay somebody across the world who can provide the same value at a fraction of the cost." 2. They are not interested in direct renegotiations and the RTO wave is still part of a "silent" layoff, which also has the side-effect of depressing salaries. Those who remain will be less likely to ask for raises, or be more willing to renegotiate to get back their remote perks. Those looking for new jobs will naturally enter a negotiation phase if they get an offer. There may be other mechanisms at play too.

mji 1y ago

I think CEO types simply believe (rightly or wrongly) that a large number of people are taking advantage of WFH to barely work.

symaxian 1y ago
I'd like to ask these CEOs, for people which are taking advantage of the system, why are they not let go? Could it be that management often have no clue how much value each employee brings to the team? Is RTO being mandated to avoid facing that uncomfortable truth?
- jayd16 1y ago
  If they admit its true but the solution still stands, would you feel any better?
- mji 1y ago
  Because their hiring process will just hire more employees who will take advantage of the system

Madhouse61 1y ago

Collaboration, Water cooler chats it's all bullshit. Cut through the fat and you find C-Suites need to justify the millions being spent on Real estate.

Drunkfoowl 1y ago

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cml123 1y ago

My employer is currently mandating a 2 day per-week RTO for all employees within 50 miles of a major office, but in my case, even if they wanted to, they'd be unable to force a return to a 5 day arrangement. My commute time has more than doubled since they closed and sold my office for a hefty sum of money. As a result of multiple offices converging to one, there are insufficient seats for the number of employees actually assigned to my office; hence, "hotdesking". I'd wager that maybe a third of the total employees assigned to the office could be present at any one point in time, so unless they purchase some additional properties, we're at a stalemate with the twice a week RTO. Most days over 90% of the desks, sometimes over 99% are taken in the building, requiring reservation weeks in advance through a seat reservation app. I have no direct teammates in the office and no two members of my 10 person team work in the same office (or state).

thegreatpeter 1y ago
Where do you work?
- cml123 1y ago
  A large insurer with an inexplicable bird mascot

glimshe 1y ago

I hate when people mention "watercooler chats" - not you, of course, but the clueless leadership/HR people that come up with this. Last time I heard it, it was: "the best ideas sometimes come from a watercooler chat, so we need to have people in the office". I've worked in offices for decades. While every now and then I'd see watercooler chats that were related to work instead of sports/bitching/weather, they never remotely compared to "ad-hoc whiteboarding chats" or "team area chats". Most Engineers I know, myself included, need focus and a space for impromptu conversations with a group of Engineers, preferably away from PMs and salespeople. If the people advocating "watercooler chats" really wanted to make Engineers productive, they would kill open floor offices and give Engineers privacy for long spontaneous technical conversations with other Engineers.

shigawire 1y ago
My employer has never allowed remote work and likely never will. They have private offices for all developers and insist on the unmeasurable value of in person work. I don't love it, but I at least respect they are upfront about it and are consistent vs flip flopping and impacting people's lives unexpectedly.

Spooky23 1y ago

Fraud. There’s a shit-ton of people working multiple jobs and outsourcing themselves. Everything is SaaS now, so that creates a liability for many larger companies with .gov or healthcare contracts.

wombatpm 1y ago

Are they requiring VP approval for zoom meetings? Requiring zoom meetings to be restricted to office network IP addresses? I’m the kind of employee that would comply, not answer my cell phone and require people to leave voicemails on my desk line, call out people who are multitasking, and actively call out managers who attend meetings via zoom. RTO with back to back zoom meetings all day is a waste of everyone’s time and energy. Make management show us the benefit of all this RTO collaboration. Oh, and I’m done checking email and teams after hours. Not safe to do so while driving.

dragonwriter 1y ago

RTO mandates are about many things, but actual business value of being in the office to the business doing the mandate is low on the list. Among the things it is about: (1) Executives with emotional attachment to certain leadership styles that are enabled by physical presence, (2) Interest in the investor class for the commercial real estate market. The business impacted may not be invested in it, but the businesses’ shareholders in sufficient numbers probably are, and so are the influential constituents of the politicians they want favors from, in a time of increasingly naked political corruption and cronyism. (3) Backdoor layoffs. RTO is unpopular with large swathes of the work force, and people will quit because of it. That’s good for a firm likely to be cutting positions anyway; there’s no need for severance, regardles of scale there’s no WARN Act notice requirement, and if you still have to cut more positions afterwards, it makes it less likely that those cuts will hit WARN Act thresholds. And while the people that quit may not be the ones it would be your first choice to cut, they are the ones that would be most likely to quit in the kind of less-employee-friendly and financially leaner (in real terms) times likely to exist for a while after cuts.

whateveracct 1y ago
This is dead on. In software especially, we have established ways for distributed individuals to collaborate (FOSS). RTO is meant to coddle the waterfall-addicted executive class.
- yepitwas 1y ago
  It's pretty funny to watch e.g. some little FOSS console game system emulator—an actual toy, or at least, a project in service of a toy and of game-playing, to a large extent, but also technically more challenging than a lot of corporate work—or maybe some FOSS MMO server re-implementation coordinate development across continents with nothing but IRC, email, and Github (if that, LOL) and do it efficiently with little friction and volunteers working in their spare time and zero people with a dedicated "project manager" title, while companies pretend they need this whole fucking edifice of communication systems and people sitting in cubicles in particular places just to shuffle a few gigabytes of spreadsheet data around with Python or whatever. Yeah. No you don't. You're, somehow, a fraction as competent and professional as some teens and 20-somethings making toys in their spare time, if you do. Definitely deserve seven-plus figure salaries for that.

LtWorf 1y ago

It's just a way to do layoffs…

whstl 1y ago

A previous company I worked at has a satellite office with one single employee, and mandates office 3 days a week. The excuse is that “people in bigger offices will feel bad if we open an exception”, so they’re spending a few thousand a month on real estate to make some poor sod miserable.

devnullbrain 1y ago
The efficiency of private markets in action.

aprilthird2021 1y ago

> I still have no idea where it comes from. I work at a company that tracks productivity in many ways and even the screentime of each employee. I'm quite sure remote employees or even hybrid employees on their WFH days, spend less time on the screen or doing things productivity trackers track compared to in office colleagues.

wiseowise 1y ago
Productivity tracker that tracks sport/fashion/travel chats for hours, dozens of smoke breaks and employees shitting every 16 minutes – very advanced tech.
- simoncion 1y ago
  Productivity tracker that tracks the fiftieth complete train-of-thought derailment from the fiftieth loud-ass boisterous conversation initiated by the sales guys across the room from me in the exposed-concrete-from-floor-to-ceiling open-plan office. Very advanced tech Corporate has paid for!
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    Remember! > we need the kind of energy and momentum that comes from smart people working side by side, solving challenging problems together
    - simoncion 1y ago
      I kept myself "in the groove" during those times by reminding myself that Moloch is sustained by this kind of energy. If not for Moloch, then for whom? He undergirds our world!

znpy 1y ago

> I still have no idea where it comes from. i was chatting with HR boss last week. he's 100% sure these kind of mandates are reductions in force (layoffs) masked as return to office.

whatevaa 1y ago

So much increased productivity when you come to the office and still make all your meetings over a call.

throwaw12 1y ago

Things which might be contributing to the RTO in my opinion: 1. Showing up. Practically speaking, when you're at home, you can do whatever you want (sleep, watch TV, work sometimes), while delivering stellar result for the company, but when you're in the office there is a chance you will deliver your stellar results and additionally contribute more, because you literally can't watch TV and take a nap. 2. Some leaders thrive in the presence of others. This is how they get their energy, receiving compliments about how awesome they are, noticing how people are respecting them while they walk around the office and so on. If one of them asks their team to return to the office, similar leaders might envy them when they boast about how much cooler their meetings feel now with five people in the room and sharing their meetings on the LinkedIn. 3. Work style of leadership. If you have noticed VP+ and C levels usually try to get to know each other on a personal level, they attend each others personal events. They work in this way, and they expect to see those same people in the office, because for them, their current network for work and life is same. So they like to see their 'friends' in the office as much as possible. Then naturally, these leaders translate mandate to their reports without context (e.g. their reports don't attend their personal life events, and they are not in their friend network)

simoncion 1y ago
> ...when you're in the office there is a chance you will deliver your stellar results and additionally contribute more, because you literally can't watch TV and take a nap. I see you've never seen many Silicon Valley software companies. Couches and comfortable chairs are a not-infrequent sight in the trendy open-plan offices, as are folks sleeping, reading, or otherwise slacking off atop them.
- throwaw12 1y ago
  it's not about missing amenities, it's about pressure from your peers and additional eyes in the office to make you work. At home you can literally spend whole day in front of TV and work a little, in the office you can as well watch TV, but not consistently, every day for full day.
  - 1y ago

whywhywhywhy 1y ago

> I still have no idea where it comes from A not so small group of people being over-employed or never available or just not pulling their weight tainted the whole thing. Also honestly once a % of us were back in the office having to talk to remote people over a video call and waiting for the lag and having them speak over you because of the lag or get confused because they can't hear the chat we can all hear in the room builds animosity towards them. Can probably list 2 people I'm happy to work with remote but the number I worked with who took the piss with it is in the double digits.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

In our case we're still hybrid, but unlike before when everyone was in the office, your lunch hour all of a sudden counts against you. They want you in the building a full 8 hours, and despite otherwise being remote, you cannot make up any hours. I miss when before COVID firms were fine with flexing hours, now it seems they want to be draconian. I was drastically more productive as a remote software engineer. I have severe insomnia and for some ungodly reason the later hours are my most productive. You wont get that productivity from me if I'm in an office a full 8 hours, I'm NOT working overtime.

xyst 1y ago

It’s simple. It comes from the boards of these companies who have investments in corporate real estate. Got to keep the scam going at the expense of worker mental state, environment, and of course control.

xylophile 1y ago

The executive class is entirely based on personal branding. If you're not changing anything, it's like being a TikTok influencer without posting any new videos. It doesn't matter what you post really, and often the more controversial you are the better. If you play your cards right, you're not an "idiot" for making the company worse, you're a "bold and innovative thought leader". You often see the same thing from ambitious managers. Aka, "managers gonna manage". The other part of the equation is pure politics and PR, which at least does provide some real value to the company (if only temporarily, and at long-term net negative). Amazon made it pretty clear that their RTO was all about maintaining their relationship with politicians.

dogleash 1y ago

> collaboration, watercooler chat I've been wondering what this really means. So I've been actively observing our open office recently. As far as I can sus out, it's the phenomenon where enough people are subject to conversations they weren't invited to, that someone will always step in and steer obviously wrong/uninformed conversations. As an operating theory, it also explains why management wants us to make more use of the large slack channels. I've previously made the joke that slack is just the din of an open office for remote workers, and, well, I guess that is the literal deliberate intent.

joeross 1y ago

“collective wisdom” is basically a polite euphemism for groupthink and given that c level folks are all taking the same mba/sigma/cthulu worship courses it’s not surprising.

krageon 1y ago

It's because C-level people are extraverted and believe in torturing others to please themselves. As a concept it fits perfectly with the reasoning that you should earn ten times what another employee at your company does.